20 April 2017

On Tyranny: Lesson 5

Lesson 5: Remember Professional Ethics

This lesson has to do with being
ethical in your job. If Hitler, for example, asks a bureaucrat to do his paperwork
for him involving murder, the bureaucrat should say "No." As Snyder says,
"There's no such thing as 'just following orders.' "

I'm trying to imagine a situation
in my own job (a professor of English) where I might be asked by a political leader
to do something I would consider unethical. I guess in my situation it would be
something like the government asking for information about students they have no
business having? I admit that I'm lacking imagination in this area, since (I guess)
I don't like to imagine anything horrible happening. Let's hope I don't have to
look back at this entry in the future and realize how naive I was.